On the Death of David Bowie

"It is death that ultimately illuminates the full spectrum of our beauty — death, the ultimate equalizer of time and space; death, the great clarifier that makes us see that, as Rebecca Goldstein put it, 'a person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world.'" 
~ Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”
~Meghan O’Rourke

Bowie, we always knew you were beautiful, inside and out. A man who struggled, honestly, as a gift to us all. We noticed and thank you.

everything, everything coincides

Thomas Lynch
Euclid

Wassily Kandinsky, Circles in a circle,
1923 Courtesy of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art 1.

What sort of morning was Euclid having
when he first considered parallel lines?
Or that business about how things equal
to the same thing are equal to each other?
Who’s to know what the day has in it?
This morning Burt took it into his mind
to make a long bow out of Osage orange
and went on eBay to find the cow horns
from which to fashion the tips of the thing.
You better have something to pass the time,
he says, stirring his coffee, smiling.
And Murray is carving a model truck
from a block of walnut he found downstairs.
Whittling away he thinks of the years
he drove between Detroit and Buffalo
delivering parts for General Motors.

Clint Fulkerson, Nebula, 2011

Might he have nursed theorems on lines and dots
or the properties of triangles or
the congruence of adjacent angles?
Or clearing customs at Niagara Falls,
arrived at some insight on wholes and parts
or an axiom involving radii
and the making of circles, how distance
from a center point can be both increased
endlessly and endlessly split—a mystery
whereby the local and the global share
the same vexations and geometry?
Possibly this is where God comes into it,
who breathed the common notion of coincidence
into the brain of that Alexandrian
over breakfast twenty-three centuries back,
who glimpsed for a moment that morning the sense
it all made: life, killing time, the elements,
the dots and lines and angles of connection—
an egg’s shell opened with a spoon, the sun’s
connivance with the moon’s decline, Sophia
the maidservant pouring juice; everything,
everything coincides, the arc of memory,
her fine parabolas, the bend of a bow,
the curve of the earth, the turn in the road.

I Remain with You

Jean Cocteau is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint Blaise Des Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. The chapel is decorated with Cocteau's murals, and carved on his gravestone, in his handwriting, is his self-chosen epitaph: "I remain with you" ("Je reste avec vous"). Cocteau believed people could transcend time and space.

one's nature and path

Tom Schutyser "Caravanserai in Iran" 2003

"It was easy enough to say...that the path to contentment was to abide by one's own nature and follow its path. Such she believed was clearly true. But if one had not the slightest hint toward finding what one's nature was, then even stepping out on the path became a snaggy matter." Ada in Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Billions and billions of stars

Nature and Culture

the things of this world, 2009 - Herbert Pfostl

Whatever the rift that separates their regimes, nature and culture have at least this much in common: both compel the living to serve the interests of the unborn. Yet they differ in their strategies in one decisive respect: culture perpetuates itself through the power of the dead, while nature, as far as we know, makes no use of this resource except in a strictly organic sense. In the human realm the dead and the unborn are native allies, so much so that from their posthumous abode--wherever it be--the former hound the living with guilt, dread, and a sense of responsibility, obliging us, by whatever means necessary, to take the unborn into our care and to keep the story going, even if we never quite figure out what the story is about, what our part in it is, the end toward which it's progressing, or the moral it contains. One day the science of genetics may decode the secrets of this custodianship, but meanwhile we may rest assured that there exists an allegiance between the dead the unborn of which we the living are merely the ligature.
~ The Dominion of the Dead ~ Robert Pogue Harrison

Fetal Trapping in Northern California, 2006 - Mark Rydan

The Road

"Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life.
The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type." Nietzsche.

I loved reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It felt like watching a movie and I read it in about as much time. But I also loved the poetic and symbolic resonances of this story. (spoiler alert) Amidst the earth's devastation, a family (albeit without a mother) takes to the road, walking through the earthly landscape, carrying "the fire," until they reach the sea.

Asako Narahashi - "Kawaguchiko" - 2003 - from half awake and half asleep in the water

The earth/sea contrast didn't strike me at first. It wasn't until they reached the ocean and the father died that I saw the sea as this force confronting earthly mortality. If the earth is a place with generative properties, the sea is no place that man can live. It offers no foothold. The sea could be read as a final mortal oblivion.

Roberto Kusterle - 2004

In Swinburne's poem A Forsaken Garden, "the ghost of a garden fronts the sea." One almost thinks McCarthy read these lines when imagining The Road:

The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.
Only the wind here hovers and revels
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers none ever will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
Years ago.

So Swinburne writes that it is to the sea that the dying look. And if there is any confusion that it is the sea that swallows the living, that consumes the "generative and degenerative" laws of mortal time, the poem's last stanza reads:

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seasacape

The sea may be unearthly, but The Road does not end in despair. It only uses the sea as a metaphor of lifelessness, of human oblivion, to counter the power of fire.

Of course "fire" represents human life force. To the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535–c. 475 BCE), fire is the primordial element out of which everything else arises. However, fire represents not just human being but human legacy. In The Road, "We carry the fire" symbolizes carrying the flame of civilization, the survival of mankind. The boy is not only the father's legacy, he is the legacy of humanity, the meaning of life.

Roberto Kusterle - "secret of lights" - 2004

In Virgil's The Aeneid, Aeneas is entrusted to relocate the House of Troy. The ghost of Hector, a fallen Trojan warrior, appears to Aeneas. "From the inner altars he carries out the garlands and the great Vesta and, in his hands, the fire that never dies" -- a fire that feeds the household gods (penates) and preserves Troy's "continuity in time." The writings of the historian Fustel de Coulanges explain that in antiquity "to be at home meant to reside within the blessing sphere of the sacred fire, in which and through which the dead maintained a presence among the living." (from Dominion of the Dead) To carry the fire is to carry the heritage of the dead into the future of those who are yet unborn.



Of course The Aeneid is a story of wanderers. Of a journey filled with the suffering and loneliness of homelessness, as well as the joy of discovery, hope and anticipation of what lies ahead. So there they they are, father and son, walking the road of life to its inevitable conclusion, meeting the good and the bad along the way. It's hard not think of Simon Hoegsberg's photograph We're All Going to Die - 100 Meters of Existence. In contrast to the darkness of The Road, Hoegsberg's photograph has a stark white background, another symbol for death. While Simon similarly captures people walking along a road, they more resemble us, people caught up in their lives, relatively oblivious that the end comes eventually.

The normal way never leads home

Photograph by Marc Riboud

If you could imagine the most incredible story ever, it would be less incredible than the story of being here. And the ironic thing is that story is not a story, it is true. It takes us so long to see where we are. It takes us even longer to see who we are. This is why the greatest gift you could ever dream is a gift that you can only receive from one person. And that person is you yourself. Therefore, the most subversive invitation you could ever accept is the invitation to awaken to who you are and where you have landed. Plato said in The Symposium that one of the greatest privileges of a human life is to become midwife to the birth of the soul in another. When your soul awakens, you begin to truly inherit your life. You leave the kingdom of fake surfaces, repetitive talk and weary roles and slip deeper into the true adventure of who you are and who you are called to become. The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown. Yet we are afraid of the unknown because it lies outside our vision and our control. We avoid it or quell it by filtering it through our protective barriers of domestication and control. The normal way never leads home.

Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realise how precious your time here is. You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language. You see through the rosters of expectation which promise you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity. Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells. You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits.

You have come out of Plato’s Cave of Images into the sunlight and the mystery of colour and imagination. When you begin to sense that your imagination is the place where you are most divine, you feel called to clean out of your mind all the worn and shabby furniture of thought. You wish to refurbish yourself with living thought so that you can begin to see. As Meister Eckhart says: Thoughts are our inner senses. When the inner senses are dull and blurred, you can see nothing in or of yourself; you become a respectable prisoner of received images. Now you realise that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ and you undertake the difficult but beautiful path to freedom. On this journey, you begin to see how the sides of your heart that seemed awkward, contradictory and uneven are the places where the treasure lies hidden. You begin to become true to yourself. And as Shakespeare says in Hamlet: To thine own self be true, then as surely as night follows day, thou canst to no man be false.

The journey shows you that from this inner dedication you can reconstruct your own values and action. You develop from your own self-compassion a great compassion for others. You are no longer caught in the false game of judgement, comparison and assumption. More naked now than ever, you begin to feel truly alive. You begin to trust the music of your own soul; you have inherited treasure that no one will ever be able to take from you. At the deepest level, this adventure of growth is in fact a transfigurative conversation with your own death. And when the time comes for you to leave, the view from your death bed will show a life of growth that gladdens the heart and takes away all fear.

~John O'Donohue

Keep on not knowing something important

Dave Anderson from Rough Beauty series

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble on a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing
something important.

~Wislawa Szymorska

Wonder in Wanderlust

Bjork's new stereoscopic 3-D video "Wanderlust" screened yesterday at FIT because a couple of FIT graduates worked on the imaging. This video is awesome!! Okay, well, we can also say...Bjork is awesome.

Dressed in mash-up fantasy Tibetan costume, Bjork communes with Himalayan yaks, traverses a raging river, struggles with her alter ego Pain-Body, and finally cascades over a waterfall, plummeting into the awaiting hands of Rivergod. This is no subtle journey of self-discover. Bjork and her dual self are fighting (or dancing as if in a pas de deux) upon the backs of these wooly mammoths as the river carries them, rushes them, towards the arms of fate.

It is magical to see a river play such a key role - here, vivid blue, ever changing, whirring and churring. And get this....made from hair.

Here's a link to the 2-d video. Slightly disappointing now I've seen it in 3-d.

Here is a link to the video in 3-d and a making-of short.

I learned from a couple of the animators, that they originally thought this video would only take a few weeks to make. Well, duh, it took them nine months and a team of volunteers to complete this labor of love. The video was created using a blend of puppetry, live action and CG, and was a collaboration between producers Ghost Robot, directors Encyclopedia Pictura (Isaiah Saxon and Sean Hellfrich) and New York-based animation house UVPhactory.

Wander in Wonder

"Katwijk-Bomen" by Ellen Kooi

"Celebration ... is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder -- the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know this."
- Martin Heidegger

Ever Present - Never Twice the Same

The air has changed here in New York. It indeed feels like fall. Many plants will die, as they are covered in snow and frost throughout the winter, but will come back next spring, with a renewed, yet unique, life force.

While I've always been drawn to Pantheism, a philosophy that posits that divinity is present in every living thing, I recently learned the word Aisthesis. For ancient Greeks it meant that knowledge could be derived through physical sensory perception. "It is a taking in of the world, a taking in of soulful communications that arise from living the phenomena in that world." (Stephen Buhner) Psychologist James Hillman says it literally means "to breathe in."

Biognosis is another new word I learned. It means "to gain knowledge from life." But it is also the application of that knowledge of systems found in nature "to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology." That is just so interesting to me!! It's also called bionics or Biomimetics. For example, the invention of Velcro was from the observation of the hooked seeds of the burdock plant which caught in the coat of George de Mestral's dog when they were out on a walk.

We tend to be far removed from nature in our urban lives, it is worth being reminded that:

"Only to him who stands where the barley stands and listens well will it speak, and tell, for his sake, what man is" - Masanobu Fukuoka

***

ever present - never twice the same
It was wonderful to come across this adage carved in stone and laid inconspicuously into the dirt floor of a wooded trail in Wave Hill. What's Wave Hill? That's what I wanted to know...

Well, it's a spectacular twenty-eight acre public garden in the Bronx, with magnificent views of the Hudson River and the Palisades.
It features greenhouses, woodlands, and numerous themed gardens, including the aquatic garden below.

Now, I'm no botanist, but the wonder and enchantment! Here's a plant where the leaves turn fire red, emulating a flower.

And the infamous lotus, seat of the buddah, shown here in the end-stage of its temporal life.

and other delights....


The bees were extremely busy, and were mostly uncooperative when it came to having their picture taken....save this guy.

Perspective

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly."

- Chuang Tse


This photograph by Adam Fuss captures the pregnancy of transformation; past and future collapsed yet resonant.

Smell of Spring

"Evening Exits" by tamsen ellen

My Name

One night when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
that I would become – and where I would find myself –
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

Mark Strand